Can you sharpen your selective hearing?

Have you ever tried listening to a conversation without attending to the meaning of what’s being said? If not, give it a go. You may be surprised to notice the words are often spoken in streams, without breaks to signal where one word ends and another begins. This makes you realise how astonishing it is that babies learn to understand the meaning of words so quickly and so faultlessly.

Once we acquire understanding of language, it’s equally amazing – and sometimes irritating – that we’re so good at selective listening. Our normal environment is filled with all sorts of sounds – traffic noise, background music, random conversations. Yet we’re able to filter out everything except what we want to understand, even if it’s not the loudest sound we’re hearing. How do we manage this? And are we able to remember the other sounds we’re hearing at the same time?

Colin Cherry, working at Imperial College in the Fifties, wanted to understand how air traffic controllers managed to filter the relevant pilot’s message from the many being broadcast simultaneously over loudspeakers in airport control towers. In a laboratory experiment, he played two different messages, both read by the same speaker at the same time, and asked participants to repeat back one of them.

This was easy when one message was played in one ear and one in the other, but not when both messages were played into both ears.

Next, he asked participants what they remembered about the unattended message. Most couldn’t identify any phrases they’d heard. They didn’t notice if the speaker switched from English to German, or even if it was played backwards. At best, they could only recognise whether the voice was masculine or feminine. Cherry called this ability to tune into one voice at a time – but only one – the “cocktail party effect”.

Later studies by Neville Moray and Anne Treisman at Oxford challenged the idea that we don’t notice anything at all in the ignored messages. Moray, and more recently Noelle Wood and Nelson Cowan at the University of Missouri, found, for example, that around a third of us notice our own name if it’s spoken while we’re attending to something else. For the most part, however, once we’ve decided where we want to direct our attention, we really do become selective listeners. This is yet another example of how difficult it is for humans to multitask.

Therefore, if you want to be efficient, it’s incredibly important to make conscious decisions about what you choose as your focus. Here’s how: Check in with yourself regularly. At least twice daily, take a moment to remind yourself what you most hope to understand and/or accomplish today. Switch off the

competition. When attending to important information, switch off all screens. Then if you can, take a walk or find somewhere quiet so you can think through what you heard.

Write it down. Embed the information more deeply by writing a quick summary.